Leonard Cohen - Old Ideas - Rolls Out Phil Spector And Kelley Lynch To Maximize The Return On Our Suffering

Monday 23 January 2012

Leonard Cohen: the maestro who’s made the most of his misery

Even on the release of 'Old Ideas' – his 12th album – the 77-year-old singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen remains happy to be sad, says William Langley

Trim and dapper, Leonard Cohen today has the look of an ageing mob lawyer, with a voice once described as 'deeper than a Siberian coalmine' Photo: SPRINGS

7:00AM GMT 22 Jan 2012

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"I’ve got no future, I know my days are few,” gasps Leonard Cohen on his latest album. It’s this kind of cheeriness that has earned the singer-poet the nickname Laughing Len – not to mention the Prince of Pessimism, the Godfather of Gloom and the Maestro of Melancholy. But, while looking on the dark side has served him well over the years, there are worrying signs that now, at the age of 77, he’s getting serious.

To some extent, Cohen’s unhappiness is understandable. He has had a tough life, both before and after he became famous. Anyone who has had a gun held to his head by Phil Spector, had his entire career earnings embezzled by an allegedly crooked manager, and been given the middle name Norman has plenty to feel resentful about.

In London last week, for the launch of Old Ideas, his 12th studio album, he showed few signs of cheering up. The critics were generally agreed that this was a very good thing. One praised the latest work as “a mix of suffering, heartbreak and darkness”, and another as “a characteristically intimate reflection on love, death and suffering”. Cohen, rarely given to commenting on his own work, confirmed: “I’ve come to the conclusion, reluctantly, that I’m going to die. But, you know, I’d like to do it with a beat.”

Perhaps we should be grateful that he has lasted this long. His splendidly unglued life has been largely spent, as one of his support acts has quipped, “sitting in airports waiting for buses”. He has come through breakdowns, bereavements, traumas, court appearances and separations, and sought help through drugs, religion and self-analysis. In the late Seventies, he made an album with the deranged producer Phil Spector, and later recalled: “One night, Phil approached me with a bottle of kosher red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder, shoved the revolver into my neck, and said, 'Leonard, I love you.’ I said, 'I really hope you do, Phil.’”

While all this surely eases the job of making music for people to slit their wrists to, it doesn’t make it any easier to be Leonard Cohen. One of the reasons he rarely gives interviews is the difficulty of addressing the core conundrum that he had never intended to be a pop singer – and, having become one, can’t give it up.

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This is no trouper’s tale. In her autobiography, the folk singer Judy Collins recalls having to practically manhandle Cohen onstage at his debut American concert in 1967. “I can’t do it,” he said, “I would die from embarrassment.” Halfway through his opening number, Suzanne, Cohen got the jitters, unstrapped his guitar and walked off again. “I can’t do it, I can’t go back,” he told her. “But you will,” she said, and, willingly or otherwise, he has been doing so ever since.

Today, he is a relatively polished stage performer, trim and dapper, with the look of an ageing mob lawyer in his charcoal suit and fedora. The voice – once described as “deeper than a Siberian coalmine” – is now deeper still and roughened by age, but it arguably suits the material. When Cohen needs some vocal variation, he can call on others, as he did in recruiting Britain’s Webb Sisters for a world tour and his Live in London album.

What he hasn’t got much better at is explaining what these dark, reproachful, sometimes caustic songs are really about. Cohen likes to deflect such questions, either by using Yeats’s line about “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” or arguing that the “sacred mechanisms” of songwriting simply don’t lend themselves to explanation. You can understand his reticence when something like Hallelujah, an oddball song on a flop album, ends up as a soundtrack to The X Factor.

Most fans agree that the repertoire’s central theme is disappointment. It isn’t hard to spot where it comes from. Cohen was born in Montreal, the son of middle-class, observant Jewish parents. He thinks his early years were happy, but, when he was nine, his father, Nathan, who ran a clothing store, died suddenly. The boy took solace in books and especially poetry, and after leaving McGill University set out to become a full-time poet.

The next big blow was discovering the difficulties of making such a career choice pay. His first poetry collections, and two early novels – The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers – sold poorly, although the latter would gain some fame when its core sex scene was voted the worst in the history of Canadian literature.

Growing disillusioned with the world of letters, he headed to New York with the vague idea of becoming a singer. There, he fell in with Andy Warhol’s Factory, a smacked-out salon of waifs, aesthetes and famous-for-15-seconds nobodies that fortunately numbered some talents, too – notably the Velvet Underground, filmmaker Paul Morrissey, and the poor, doomed model-cum-muse Edie Sedgwick. Cohen could see the difference and understood what it would take to succeed.

The odds remained against him. He was already in his early thirties, and pop promoters tended to ask: “Aren’t you a little old for this game?” He wasn’t good-looking, couldn’t sing very well and had no obvious charisma. The breakthrough came when Judy Collins, whom he had met in a club, agreed to record his composition, Suzanne. In 1967, The Songs of Leonard Cohen was released, keying perfectly into the fashionable singer-poet genre established by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Unsettling, literate and beautifully phrased, the record made Cohen a star.

All these years later, he remains one. Each attempt to retire has been thwarted. For several years in the Nineties, he vanished into a Zen monastery in California, but emerged in 2000 claiming that he had beaten depression and was keen to work again. He soon changed his mind, but in 2005 discovered that more than

$5 million in earnings had vanished from his bank accounts. He won a civil suit against his former manager Kelley Lynch, but failed to recover the money, and was forced to return to work. He has never married, listing matrimony as high among his phobias.

However few days he claims to have, they’ll be spent like last week’s – pleasing, teasing and worrying the fans. Success, he says, is survival, and he currently has both ends covered.

David Mamet Convinced Of Phil Spector's Innocence

The writer/director explains why he decided to make a movie for HBO about the disgraced music producer, who is now in prison on second-degree murder charges for the 2003 killing of Lana Clarkson:

Mr. Mamet says he didn't care about the trial as it was happening, but when his agent urged him to see a 2009 documentary on Mr. Spector, he became intrigued. He went from considering Mr. Spector a killer to questioning his guilt in the 2003 murder of Lana Clarkson. Watching the film, he says he found himself thinking: "There's no way he killed that girl. He got convicted of 'I don't like you."

Al Pacino will star in the HBO movie.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/10/david_mamet_convinced_of_phil_1.html

Preserving the Value of Unanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Anti-Deadlock Instructions by Emil J. Bove III

C. CALIFORNIA’S APPROACH: THE PHIL SPECTOR TRIAL

California rejected the Allen charge in 1977,201 and, perhaps relatedly, trials
in its state courts appear to end in deadlock-related mistrials more frequently
than the national average.202 Like Arizona’s court rules, California’s court rules
also permit flexible action by the trial court when the jury reaches an “impasse”:

(a) Determination
After a jury reports that it has reached an impasse in its deliberations, the
trial judge may, in the presence of counsel, advise the jury of its duty to
decide the case based on the evidence while keeping an open mind and
talking about the evidence with each other. The judge should ask the jury if it
has specific concerns which, if resolved, might assist the jury in reaching a
verdict.

(b) Possible further action
If the trial judge determines that further action might assist the jury in
reaching a verdict, the judge may:
(1) Give additional instructions;
(2) Clarify previous instructions;
(3) Permit attorneys to make additional closing arguments; or
(4) Employ any combination of these measures.203

The most notable distinction from Arizona’s rule is that California does not
suggest that the evidence may be reopened upon a question from the jury.
Music producer Phil Spector’s recent murder trial presents an example in
which the trial court risked stretching this rule so far that the proceedings would
damage the legitimacy of the jury process. Spector was accused of killing
actress Lana Clarkson in 2003.204 The much-publicized trial lasted four
months.205 After deliberating for seven days, the jury indicated that it was
deadlocked, noting that the split was seven votes to five but following the
judge’s instructions not to reveal which side had the majority.206 Three jurors
suggested that additional instructions would be helpful, including more guid-


The judge then “elicited a back-and-forth with several jurors as he sought to
pinpoint what issues they were stuck on.”208 The jurors indicated disagreement
about the meaning of “reasonable doubt” and that they were confused about
how to weigh the evidence and interpret an instruction regarding the elements
of second-degree murder.209 Following this exchange, the judge rejected the
option of additional instructions on lesser-included offenses, agreeing with the
defense that such instructions might coerce the jury into believing that a verdict
was necessary at all costs.210 In the end, the judge simply re-read most of the
instructions, removing language he said misstated the law and adding additional
instructions about “reasonable doubt.”211 After about another week of additional
deliberation, the judge declared a mistrial due to the deadlock.212 Upon being
discharged, jurors indicated that two “holdouts” in favor of Spector had prevented
the conviction.213

The biggest problem with the judge’s actions in this case is that there is a
great risk in conducting the type of back-and-forth that took place in this trial; it
injects too many unknowns into the process. Jurors are likely to put great
emphasis on everything that the judge says or asks. Even subtle facial expressions
from the judge risk the type of influence that the anti-coercion principle
seeks to avoid—the judge should not inappropriately affect the deliberations
taking place in the jury room while they are in progress. Juries frequently ask to
review evidence or to have testimony read to them, and some interaction with
the court during deliberations is probably unavoidable in many cases. Nonetheless,
these interactions should be circumscribed as much as possible. That is
why both the Arizona and California rules permit the judge to solicit indications
via notes from the jury about questions or other things that might help it reach a
verdict, but the rules suggest that conducting this inquiry through in-court
conversation is not appropriate. The judge in the Spector case seems to have run
afoul of the rule and risked tainting the process.

Second, the judge’s alterations to the jury instructions were probably a
mistake. He was correct not to instruct the jury on the lesser-included charge of
manslaughter after it had reached an impasse.214 Substituting a lesser-included
charge after deliberations had begun would suggest to the jury that the court
preferred some type of conviction in the case, even if on a different charge,
rather than a mistrial.

By removing part of the initial murder instruction, however, the judge
conveyed a “not-so-subtle message to the jury that there may be more ways to
find Spector guilty than they have been thinking of . . . .”215 The jury could infer
from the new instruction that, because the initial instruction was so incorrect
that it had to be removed, they should look more carefully at the charge in the
first place. If the latter instruction seemed more permissive, it would suggest to
the jury that it should look more carefully at convicting Spector. Essentially, by
making this change, the judge “alter[ed] the rules by which a jury makes a
decision.”216 Even if a curative measure was available for the erroneous instruction
in the first place, the judge impermissibly invaded the province of the jury.
The close, public scrutiny of his actions meant that, even if the jury had reached
a verdict, society would certainly not have accepted it as a legitimate stamp of
disapproval of Spector’s actions.

The interaction illustrates the fragility of the symbolism associated with the
jury system. The rules in both Arizona and California offer judges wide latitude
in dealing with and “assisting” split juries, but most trial courts are hesitant to
go beyond re-reading instructions before declaring a mistrial. Their actions
demonstrate appropriate regard for the sanctity of the jury’s deliberations and
the symbolic legitimacy that attaches to verdicts resulting from a process
requiring unanimous verdicts. Departing too far from contemporary antideadlock
instructions to “assist” the jury through the procedures available in
these states might reduce the incidence of mistrials, but these actions also risk
damaging the perceived legitimacy of the criminal process. Most judges do not
go too far with the more radical methods of dealing with divided juries. Nor
should they.

CONCLUSION

This Note articulated some instrumental principles to guide the debate regarding
anti-deadlock instructions. Properly defined, the primary concern in handling
a divided jury is that the judge may coerce jurors in a way that taints the
ultimate verdict, prevents it from being the product of the jury’s deliberations,
and limits the extent to which the community accepts the products of the
criminal justice system as legitimate. The sanctity of the deliberation room and
the concept that the verdict is solely the jury’s should be paramount concerns.
Although unanimity does not necessarily provide major benefits in terms of
instruction would look. . . . The defense will easily argue that if the jury then comes back with a guilty verdict on manslaughter, it was ‘a tainted compromise verdict . . . .’”) ...

http://www.georgetownlawjournal.org/issues/pdf/97-1/Bove.PDF

This is the California Supreme Court writing in People v. Karis (1968) 46 Cal.3d 612, 672:

“Evidence of a defendant's statement regarding possible future criminal conduct in a hypothetical situation has at least as great a potential for prejudice in suggesting a propensity to commit crime as evidence of other crimes. Therefore, the content of and circumstances in which such statements are made must be carefully examined both in determining whether the statements fall within the state-of-mind exception, as circumstantial evidence that defendant acted in accordance with his stated intent, and in assessing whether the probative value of the evidence outweighs that potential prejudicial effect.


Although once again the specific hearsay exception under which the evidence was admitted was not an issue in the case, People v. Rodriguez (1986) 42 Cal.3d 730, 757, 230 Cal.Rptr. 667, 726 P.2d 113, is instructive with regard to the admissibility of “generic” threats. We stated there: “A defendant's threat against the victim ... is relevant to prove intent in a *637 prosecution for murder. ( People v. Lew (1968) 68 Cal.2d 774, 778, 69 Cal.Rptr. 102, 441 P.2d 942.) The statements here in question did not specify a victim or victims but were aimed at any police officer who would attempt to arrest appellant. Such a generic threat is admissible to show the defendant's homicidal intent where other evidence brings the actual victim within the scope of the threat. [Citations.] Hence the statements were relevant and not excludable under Evidence Code section 1101.”

The same reasoning leads to a conclusion that statements of intent of this nature, reflecting intent to kill a particular category of victims in specific circumstances, fall within the state-of-mind exception to the hearsay rule. (Evid.Code, § 1250.) The evidence is therefore admissible unless the circumstances in which the statements were made, the lapse of time, or other evidence suggests that the state of mind was transitory and no longer existed at the time of the charged offense."

Several points:

1. The statement by Spector a decade before Lana Clarkson died was not a statement of intent to kill anyone.

2. It did not relate to a specific class of persons under specific circumstances.

3. But the "all women are C-words who deserve a bullet in their heads" comment was highly prejudicial.

Under Division Three precedent, the 1101 evidence was improperly admitted to show motive

That is one point of view that I suspect is not shared by either of the Spectors.

Unitil that day, the appeal and wrongful death case march on:

Excerpt from Spector Reply brief: Under Division Three precedent, the 1101 evidence was improperly admitted to show motive:

“Thus, respondent cites “two types of motive evidence in the area of uncharged
misconduct” — where the uncharged acts cause the charged crime, and where the
uncharged acts arise from the same cause as the charged crime. (RB, at 75.) If that
second type is to be admitted, however, it can only be with recognition of a critical
distinction between the two types of motive evidence in terms of admissibility, as
Division Four recognized in Scheer and Division Seven recognized in Walker. When
Walker upheld the admission of uncharged acts of the second type, that is, those evincing
the same cause as the charged crime, it did so only on the basis of their being contributing
factors under a “common plan or design” theory, finding “sufficiently distinctive”
common features to support an inference that the defendant committed both the
uncharged and charged acts. (139 Cal.App.4th at pp. 804-805.) In other words, when
other offense evidence is being proffered as an intermediate fact to prove an ultimate fact
with a strict standard for admissibility, such as identity or common plan or scheme, the
“motive” evidence must meet that high standard.

That was the holding of this Division in Hassoldt v. Patrick Media Group, Inc.
(2000) 84 Cal. App.4th 153, where the Court held that other offense evidence is
admissible as proof of motive only if the identity of the actor is not in dispute and that, if
that identity is in dispute, the other-offense evidence is admissible only if it meets the
most stringent test for admissibility under an identity theory (a test which the trial court
found that the prosecution could not meet as to Spector). Respondent first attempts to
evade application of this principle by asserting that the instant case “was not one where
the identity of the murderer was unknown; if there was a murderer, it was appellant.”
(RB, at 80.) That attempt is utterly specious. The identity of the person who pulled the
trigger was the material factual dispute in this case, as respondent acknowledges in its
brief. (RB, at 87; see also RB, at 97: “Either appellant shoved the gun in Clarkson’s
mouth, or she did.”) The dispositive admissibility point is “that the identity of the actor is
in dispute” (Hassoldt, supra, 84 Cal.App.4th at p. 166 [emphasis added].)”

http://boards.insessiontrials.com/showthread.php?377972-Phillip-spector-legal-thread-wrongful-death-case-pending-murder-appeal

The Hunt For Dr. Henry Lee - Dr. Michael Baden & Bill Pavelic

THE HUNT FOR DR. HENRY LEE - DR. MICHAEL BADEN AND BILL PAVELIC

"....After years of grabbing negative headlines for losing the OJ Simpson double homicide case and other celebrity trials, involving the same three participants, it was inevitable and predictable that the Los Angeles criminal injustice system via Robbery Homicide Division would administer their personal vendettas against me, Dr. Henry Lee, and Dr. Michael Baden. That moment arrived in 2007 when music mogul Phil Spector was charged with the murder of Lana Clarkson. Revenge by the LAPD Robbery Homicide Division against three former members of the O.J.Simpson's "Dream Team" would be a "MF"and "MF" didn't stand for Mark Fuhrman...."

"....Exposing the truth is never in the interest of those who suppress it and eliminating three members of the O.J. Simpson's "Dream Team" would have to be executed with precision by the Los Angeles Police Robbery Homicide Division and their protectorate, the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office...."

"....The Los Angeles District Attorney's Office and the LAPD Robbery Homicide Division in the Phil Spector's (2007) murder trial embarked on a mission to intentionally frame me, Dr. Henry Lee, and Dr. Michael Baden, in a manufactured and bogus "obstruction of justice" crime. The architects of this conspiracy involved Deputy District Attorney Patrick Dixon and Robbery Homicide Detective Victor Pietrantoni...."

".... Deputy District Attorney Patrick Dixon, got the judge to creatively, albeit injudiciously, grant the LAPD Robbery Homicide Division authority to "investigate" the circumstances of the missing evidence and assigned this case to Robbery Homicide Division (RHD) investigator Victor Pietrantoni, a friend of Deputy District Attorney Patrick Dixon and Anthony Pellicano...."

"....What a "happy coincidence" that this case would end up in the lap of Detective Victor Pietrantoni a RHD STUD who was nicknamed "Casanova" because of his steamy relationship with a high ranking Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney. Detective Victor Pietrantoni is just one of many LAPD officers who are incestuously connected and or married to members of the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, The City Attorney's Office and or to the jurists assigned to the Los Angeles and Orange County Superior Courts. Consequently, allowing Victor Pietrantoni to conduct an impartial obstruction of justice investigation was tantamount to allowing the fox to investigate who broke into the hen house...."

"....Instead of convening the Grand Jury to investigate the false allegations manufactured by the District Attorney prosecutors, which were revolting, contemptible and based on perjurious witnesses, the Judge relied on a page from the "Spanish Inquisition" and used his black robe, minus the hood, to lunch a personal, vicious, unethical, and unrelenting televised smear campaign against Dr. Henry Lee, Dr. Michael Baden, and Investigative Consultant Bill Pavelic. The judicial objective (payback) had one purpose in mind; to publicly humiliate and destroy the professional reputation of the "Dream Team" participants....knowing it could be accomplished with impunity while hiding behind judicial immunity...."

"....It should come as no shock to anyone in Los Angeles, especially the judiciary, that dishonesty was compulsory in much of Robbery Homicide Division (under Chief Daryl Gates) and that my old colleagues at the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles District Attorneys Office have shown an affinity of using the grotesque Robbery Homicide Division to dispense their own form of perverted justice through patently rigged and self serving investigations...."

http://guiltyofincompetence.com/lapd-hunt-for-dr-henry-lee-dr-michael-baden-b-pavelic-t99.html